Pass the Jim Rex Cigarette Tax for Jobs!

Pass the Rex Cigarette Tax for Jobs!

Dear SC Leader:

Jim Rex has announced a proposal to raise the cigarette tax to the national average with the proceeds split between health care and education. I hope you will support it. Challenging times, by nature, do not lend themselves to simple fixes. They require bold solutions.

It would be a mistake to view raising the cigarette tax to the national average as simply a plan to prevent teacher furloughs. At its core, it’s a plan to create and preserve jobs and put South Carolina on sound economic footing, a plan to improve health and wellness, and a plan to keep our state’s federal tax contribution here at home, instead of going to help other states.

This plan prevents 48,000 thousand teachers from being furloughed for one full week, and in addition to the negative impact on our kids’ education, this kind of furlough would be a $100 million dollar hit to our economy. A furlough would mean that teachers would have less money to spend, affecting every small business where teachers shop, every restaurant where teachers and their families eat, and every gas station where teachers fill up their cars. This is a hit that our economy cannot afford to take.

The Rex plan would also trigger millions in federal matching funds for health care for our kids. These are dollars that North Carolina, Georgia, and almost every state in the union are maximizing to help pay for health care for their children, but that South Carolina has left on the table. We should do all we can to make sure that our federal tax dollars come back home to help our state.

And this source of revenue is no small matter: for every dollar raised by this tobacco tax that we spend on health care, we will get up to four dollars back from the federal government. By leveraging this pot of money, we will generate thousands of good-paying jobs in the health care sector – precisely the kind of jobs that we need to be focused on creating in our state.

In addition to the economic benefits, the Rex plan will also reduce the number of kids who start smoking, saving not only lives, but money over the long term in future health care costs associated with cancer and other tobacco-related illnesses.

By asking smokers to bear these costs instead of our school teachers, the Rex plan simply does what other states all across the country have already done. It's a shame to see other states getting through these tough economic times in better shape than South Carolina. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel here – all we need to do is take this common sense step so that South Carolina is not left behind once again.

The bottom line is that this is an idea that is long overdue. South Carolina has been debating this course of action for years, and it's time to pass this plan that would do so much for the state when it comes to creating jobs, improving our fiscal outlook, and improving both health and education.

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